Friday, April 30, 2010

I was telling it over and over again : crash reports are essential for developers, to make their apps more stable, and user experience more enjoyable.
It looks like google agree with this statement, as they added some crash reports in the developer page :

This is very good news, as it will make the Android platform a better platform to develop on.

How does it work ?
It looks like when a application crashed, the phone let the user send a feedback to the developer( with a custom message from the user, the callstack, and ... ??? ).
I still don't know what is in this feedback - as I got 0 reports - but it definitively looks interesting !
You can also see that is also reports freezes, that user made crash reporters can not intercept !
The developer can then mark a report as 'old' ( so it won't appear again ? ).

For the moment it is still at experimental state. For instance, it looks like you can check feedbacks from other application, but I couldn't get it to work ( having 'server errors' ), and I find it strange for privacy reasons.